


Gather and Deliver

by JDBeckett



Category: Original Work
Genre: Life after death sort of thing if you would, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 00:02:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3956866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JDBeckett/pseuds/JDBeckett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lives of Athanasios (Thanasis, for short) and Vitus (Vitale, who lenghtens their names for a nickname? He does) as they happen. I have no idea how often I'll be updating it as it'll be more a series of shorts than proper chapters that follow one another smoothly.</p>
<p>Warnings are set mostly for the first short so far.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gather and Deliver

_"I don't honesty recall how it started." The teen rests his face in his hands, not wishing to I look upon the man sitting across from him._

_"We've been over this before, you have to speak truthfully if you want to make some progress. I cannot help you if you lie to me."_

_"I don't want to be here. Do I **have** to do this?" His voice is muffled by his hands still resting over his face. He still refuses to look up to the other man, well aware of what he would see._

_"Yes. Now from the beginning."_

_Sighing, Athanasios closes his eyes and leans back into the almost plush couch. He presses his palms into his closed lids and mutters under his breath before letting his shoulders go lax. "My father used to beat me. I killed myself."_

_"Not that beginning, young man, this is about—"_

_"You told me to start at the beginning, I am. Do you want me to talk or not?"_

_Sighing, the older man shakes his head but goes silent, motioning for the teen to go on._

~

When he was nine years old, his mother died. His father told him she had died in her sleep but he knew better, he knew she had taken all of the pills she could find in the house and swallowed all of those down as quickly as she could so all of the pain could be forever-gone. She had told him about her plans before but those plans had always involved him. She had always promised that she would take him with her when the pain became too much.

She hadn't.

He couldn't attend her funeral. His father, drunk out of his mind, as was usual at this point, slept right on through it and didn't bother trying to make it or make excuses for why he didn't go when he did get up much later that afternoon. By then, Thanasis had made himself some food by putting peanut butter on two slices of bread and adding in just a little bit of jam. The container was nearly empty and he knew he would not get another one once it was so he did all he could to make it last, he did that with everything in the house, not quite certain of when his father would go to buy food.

Life with his father had never been easy though it had gotten worse when the man had first lost his job, he had started drinking and what had been evenings when the man only yelled because he was tired from work turned into yelling and hitting but his mother, bless her soul, she protected him, made him hide in his closet until all of the yelling stopped. She would make him count to one hundred very slowly when it did stop and then he could step out. Usually by then his father was passed out either on the couch or in bed and he could rush to his mother to hug her as gently as he could, to cling to her for a few moments before he'd fetch that little white box with the red cross on it so she could fix herself up for another day.

He couldn't understand why she didn't simply leave her husband, take both of them away from all the pain and the ache. It was only by the time he was twelve that he really realized that there was no one out there who would have taken her in, she had no family and no friends and no money to her name. They had lived in a very small town and most people turned a blind eye.

It was all of a week before his father brought home another woman and then another and another. They only stayed the night, at times only leaving when he would be coming back from school in the afternoon. He tuned them out as best as he could, the moaning, the begging, the loud sex noises.

This lasted until he was just about that, twelve. When he turned twelve, his father stopped bringing strangers home and into his bed and turned to his only son. Thanasis's first experience with sex was painful and bloody, all his father had wanted was an easy lay and after beating his son into submission, that was what he had. Thanasis had no fight left in him when the new sort of pain blossomed in him, he had even less fight left in him when he father left him on his small bed, bleeding and probably broken.

It happened once a week from there on. When he turned fourteen, every week turned into every other day but at this point the teen had stopped trying to put up a fight.

No one ever asked him why he was bruised and limping. No one ever looked twice at him or offered him help when he was loaded down heavily with grocery bags that pulled at the aches settled deep into his bones. His mother's way out seemed like a dream at this point and he still wished desperately that she would have taken him with her.

On his sixteenth birthday, his father came home with his drinking buddies and this was Thanasis's first (and last) experience with group sex. He couldn't think of it as rape, could he? He knew the word, he knew what it was and his mind screamed at him that it was but it didn't really seem to matter much.

The following night, his father, sober perhaps for the first time in too long, came barging into his room, complaining that one of his buddies had found him unresponsive and that he had to try a little harder because from now on this was how his debts (his father's, not his own) would be repaid. 

For the first time in his life the young man put up a fight. He stood up as tall as he could, refusing to be turned into a whore for others. That his father wanted to take his pleasure with him he could live with for a little while more but that he would be sold to others was a whole other level of low that he refused to sink to. The response was immediate. The blows that came from his father were more precise, vision not dulled by alcohol and they were much stronger.

What neither men probably took into account was the little box Thanasis had been in the process of putting away when his father barged into the room, it was right there, on the floor and when Thanasis backed away from one particular blow he tripped on it and went over, his head hitting the corner of his dresser and his vision going dark.

When he came to again, he was outside, staring at the full moon and he didn't even ache, it made no sense.

~

_"So you didn't actually kill yourself." The man, his therapist, one Athanasios really has no desire to be talking to cuts him off midsentence._

_The dark haired teen blinks himself back to the present, staring at the man whose appearance changed depending on who saw him; Vitus had told him that, no matter if they were soul gatherers or soul bringers, there was a small team who saw to their mental wellbeing and all of their appearances changed depending on who they were talking to. What he saw was, he assumed, what his mother would have looked like if she had been a man. That was the one thing, the physical gender of the person did not change, only the general appearance._

_His heart tightens a little at the thought of Vitus but he pushes it away, letting out a softly shuddered breath before he looks at the ceiling once more, not wanting to look upon his mother though it had been years since then, decades he could assume, keeping track of time was difficult._

_"I stood up to my father, in the years that he had been beating me and forcing himself on me, I never once fought him back, I knew it would have resulted in only more pain so I never did. But on that particular afternoon, I was tired of it all, I **had** been considering taking a knife from the kitchen to just open up my wrists, he had beaten me to getting there, no pun I suppose."_

_"Very well, continue."_

_Grimacing, the teen (it was how he looked as he died and it was his preferred physical appearance though he could change it depending on who he was picking up) sighed again and dropped his head back to the top of the couch._

~

Looking around himself, Thanasis tried to make sense of what he was seeing and how he was feeling. He moved his weight a little from one foot to the other and the pain that had always been near his knee due to an injury suffered through hiking (that is what he told everyone who asked) was missing and he shuddered in relief. He touched his way along his arms, down his sides, up along his face and there was not a single hint of ache.

Once that sank in, his attention finally settled on a tall man standing just a few steps away from him. Backing away in surprise and fright, the teen eyed the man who didn't budge, merely was looking at him as if studying him.

"Who are you?" The words whisper soft, as if he was afraid that speaking any louder would shatter whatever this was, a dream perhaps though it seemed unlikely, dreams never were pain free and they tended to be nightmares.

A light smile found its way to the man's lips and Thanasis took a moment to study the stranger. The slight curls in the deep golden-brown hair, the tan skin, the slightly elfin features. He couldn't really tell what colour the man's eyes were but it didn't seem to matter, they were looking at him with something that might have resembled concern.

"Am I dead?" Since he hadn't gotten an answer to his first question, a second perhaps was better meant to be asked. Maybe this stranger wasn't supposed to have a name.

"You are." The voice that answered him was low but warm, gentle and it reminded him of younger years where his mother hadn't cowered in fear of her husband and Thanasis closed his eyes, a tremor running through him at the memory. A hand settled on top of his head and he flinched but it stayed where it was until he managed to calm down. "We're going to a better place. Well you are, now come."

From the shadows at the man's side, two large beasts formed, seeming to be made of smoke. They ran straight towards the house, through the closed doorway and barely a moment later, the man Thanasis had been forced to call his father for sixteen years of his life began screaming. It was a scream of pain, not even one of fear.

The teen stared at the house in morbid fascination until the screaming turned bubbly and choked and then died out altogether. Turning his eyes up to the stranger as the two beasts—hounds maybe—came back out of the house, he was met with a half-smile and a gentle shrug.

A hand pressed lightly between his shoulders and he turned in the direction he was wanted, walking off into the distance and into the darkness.


End file.
